A shadowy cult of elites who rule the world. They've been given different names through the ages. The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commision, the Templars. Often anti-semetic and anti-intellectual, the charges against the group are a conspiracy to control and dominate humankind. These conspiracy theories have been around for hundreds of years and have served a very sinister purpose - to deflect the examination of true power.
However, what if I were to tell you there really is a shadowy conspiracy to rule the world? Which of those groups would I point to? None of them. Yet there is a group of elites controlling everything you see or hear, aiming to control how you think. They are advertising companies, capitalists, media corporate giants. Heavily invested in marketing using the latest in technology, social science, and propaganda techniques they manipulate you everyday.
They get to you buy soft-drinks. They get you to buy bottled water. They get you to eat food filled with sugar and fat, in carefully defined proportions to tap into your primal desires. They weaponize sexuality and lust to pinpoint your id and subvert your ego. They get you to equate money above all else with value and worth. They get you to champion a system that holds you down and leeches the life from you. They control the media you consume, the news you digest, and the conversations you have with your peers, friends, and family. They have more power than any other group has ever had in human history. They don't have a single name because they work 'hidden' in the open right where you could see them. They have infiltrated government, church, and education.
You are carefully steered away from ever examining them too closely. You are under control. The more you deny or repudiate this control, the stronger their grip becomes. They've turned psychology and sociology into weapons to wage a war for your trust, your interest, your loyalties. Just 6 companies control almost all the media consumed in the US.
Social media algorithms keep you locked tight in echo chambers that reinforce your already held beliefs. You are slowly guided into more extreme versions of your own views until you've been radicalized without even realizing it was happening. Modern celebrity, glam, glitz, and gore have replaced the gods of old to play out vapid morality plays that only serve to encourage you to consume, consume, and consume more.
The so-called Free Market and Capitalism itself has taken the form of a religion. Not to be questioned, considered, or challenged. Supply-side economics are the new dogma and consumerism the new liturgy. All controlled by the chaotic blend of old and new money that represents the elite capitalists at the top of the social hierarchy. The mysteries of the market are performed by priests and magicians on Wall Street while the common man or woman is shunted out of participating. When they dare pierce the veil in the temple they are slapped back. Challengers to the priesthood are crushed without mercy.
The Cult of Mammon is real, and it rules our modern society. Children, the elderly, the frail, the poor are sacrificed on the altar to Moloch in service to the Godhead Mammon. Unchecked greed and unregulated concentration of power and wealth have allowed the Abomination that causes Desolation to arise. As grief, ruin, and angst spread and the environment is abused into a wasteland. This curse even dares name itself 'Christianity'. So-called patriots beat thier fellows with the flag of their nation on the Capitol steps.
And while this storm of rapine to our very home occurs we are divided among each other. We fight for crumbs and argue about trivialities and shrinking arbitrary taboos as we are fleeced, sheared, sacrificed. There is a shadowy conspiracy of elites who rule the world and we worship and elevate them ourselves. Prostrate before them in genuflection with starry-eyed dreams of joining in the elite priesthood, debasing ourselves for the promise of even getting a taste of the 'good life'.
The Cult of Mammon rules America in the guise of Patriotism, Capitalism, and Christianity - and Americans are willing thralls to their own debasement and defiling.